There is an increasing desire to make certain consumer level devices, such as televisions, be more interactive with a user than in the past. One of the ways in which interactivity may be achieved is through connection of the television set to outside networks, such as the Internet. Television viewers are, even today, frequently presented during their viewing with Internet addresses where they may find more information related to the programming which they are currently viewing. With the state of current technology, a viewer that desires to access information from this Internet address would need to remember or jot down the address, and then access it through the Internet via a personal computer or other processing device.
Initiatives have been proposed to facilitate the implanting or insertion of relatively small amounts of universal resource locator-type data in a broadcast signal. Universal resource locators (URLs) are essentially Internet addresses which provide simple access to relevant Internet resources. Such implanted addresses could then be used to automatically connect a user to the site on the external network at the specified address.
The initiatives for inserting URL-type data in a broadcast signal propose for the data to be generally stored in the area of a vertical blanking interval in the broadcast signal. The URL data could then be retrieved from the vertical blanking interval by a consumer-level device or the television. However, a problem with this type of proposal is the large investment it would require on the part of the broadcasters, advertisers and cable companies. This investment would involve changing the existing content of programs or commercials to insert such data into the stream. There would also be the investment required by a consumer for a hardware device to decode the data which has been implanted in the vertical blanking interval.